Chapter 18
Chapter 18:
Something about Alaric’s face when he watched me eat reminded me of someone. Not a face I could place—more like the ghost of a gesture, the echo of an expression I’d known in a language I’d forgotten. A tilt of the head. A particular quality of attention. The way his eyes tracked my reaction to the steak with the intensity of a man who has staked something significant on whether the seasoning works.
“Have we met before?” I asked, setting down my fork. “Before the night in the rain, I mean. You feel… familiar p>
His mouth curved. Not the polished smile he wore in public—the one that communicated authority and control to other Alphas—but something smaller, more private, like a lamp turned low. He raised a finger to his lips.
“Eat your steak,” he said. “Some mysteries are better on a full stomach p>
I was about to press—I have never been good at letting things go, which is ironic given that I let a man destroy me for a decade—when the noise reached us from below.
Not noise. Commotion. The particular frequency of raised voices and shifting bodies that means someone has arrived uninvited and is refusing to leave.
Alaric’s expression changed the way weather changes over water—fast, complete, one system replacing another. The softness vanished. What replaced it was something older, harder, the face of an Alpha whose territory has been breached.
He moved toward the stairs. I followed.
The lobby of Alaric’s residence was built for elegance, not confrontation, but confrontation had found it anyway. Two groups of wolves faced each other across the marble floor—Silverveil on the left, Nightblood on the right—arranged in the specific geometry of animals calculating whether to fight or retreat. The air smelled like ozone and adrenaline, that particular metallic tang that precedes violence the way humidity precedes rain.
And at the center, Thane.
He looked terrible. Not in the dramatic, romantic way that suffering looks in novels—not gaunt and brooding with artfully shadowed cheekbones. He looked like a man who hadn’t slept in days and had been drinking instead: swollen around the eyes, unshaven, his shirt half-untucked, radiating the particular desperation of someone who has lost something and cannot accept that the losing was his own doing.
“Alaric!” His voice bounced off the marble. “Come out here right now p>
I stepped forward—instinct, habit, the muscle memory of a decade spent positioning myself between Thane’s anger and whatever he was aiming it at. But Alaric’s hand found mine before I could pass him.
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His fingers were warm and dry and certain.
“I’ll go with you,” he said quietly. Not to Thane—to me. “To break the bond. You won’t have to face this alone p>
I looked at him. Then at our hands. Then at his face, which held the particular expression of a man making a promise he has no intention of qualifying with fine print.
I nodded. And smiled—a real one, unexpected, arriving like a bird on a windowsill.
Thane saw the hands. Thane saw the smile. And Thane, who had spent ten years making sure I had nothing to smile about, responded the way a man responds when he discovers the thing he discarded has been found by someone else.
“Alaric, you dare steal my wife p>
The word hit me like a slap.
Wife.
In ten years of marriage, he had called me many things. The woman who trapped me. The whore. Celina’s—no, Isolde’s—mistake. The burden. The punishment. The reminder. He had called me names I won’t repeat and names I’ve tried to forget and names that arrived like small, precise wounds designed to scar rather than kill.
But never wife.
Now that I was standing in another man’s lobby, holding another man’s hand, the word he’d withheld for a decade suddenly materialized in his mouth as if it had been there all along, waiting for the exact moment when it could do the most damage.
It was almost funny. Almost.
“Isolde.” His voice cracked—actually cracked, like a surface bearing too much weight. “Did you fall in love with him p>
The question hung in the air. Behind it, I could hear what he was really asking: Did you replace me? Did you find in someone else what I refused to give you? Is this my fault?
Yes. To all of it. But I wasn’t going to give him that.
“When are you going to break the bond?” I asked instead. Because that was the only question that mattered—the only door left between me and whatever came next.
“You’re my mate!” He stepped forward, and the wolves on both sides tensed. “How can you talk about breaking it? How can you just p>
“Thane.” I kept my voice level. It cost me more than he would ever know. “You don’t love me. You never did. So why hold on p>
“If this was revenge, ten years is enough. My father is dead. You didn’t even know, but he’s dead. The man you blamed for everything—gone. And his ashes?” My voice thinned. “His ashes were scattered on your living room floor and crushed under your mistress’s shoe. So tell me. What more do you want p>
I paused. Let it land.
“Do you want my life too? Because at this point, it might be the only thing I haven’t given you p>
The rage that had been holding my shoulders rigid dissolved into something emptier, and I watched the words reach him—watched them cross the lobby like a slow-moving wave and break against whatever was left of the man I’d married.
Thane trembled. His mouth opened, then closed. The roar that had been building in his chest stalled, and for one exposed, terrible moment, he looked exactly like what he was: a man standing in the wreckage of everything he’d built and realizing, too late, that the demolition had been his own project.